Republican simplicity on trial: courtrooms, aesthetics, and the law

Abstract

This chapter explores the courtroom trial’s performative dimensions in two quite distinct novels from the 1850s, James Fenimore Cooper’s final novel The Ways of the Hour and E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, each of which makes trial scenes central to their narrative action. Moreover, each work emphasizes that something beyond the newly hegemonic legal formalism and a cold, calculating administration of justice is at stake in a trial. Each novel asserts that trials attempt to performativly establish a transcendent referent where there is none. For both authors, a trial’s outcome, given its inherent performativity, is capricious and arbitrary given this absence. Not stopping at this critique, Cooper asserts that the United States requires a new legal aesthetics that rejects an aesthetics of “republican simplicity” identified with mob rule in favor of one more closely identified with the Italian Risorgimento and the Biblical King David. Contrarily, Southworth’s novel suggests that sentiment and divinely-sanctioned—not merely performative—promises, rather than formalism, contracts, and duty, ought to undergird the United States legal system. Despite their divergence on the solution, each identifies a similar problem and tethers the law to Christian transcendence instead of secular legal formalism.